I recently stumbled upon a session by George Couros, the maestro behind "The Innovators Mindset" and a bunch of other fancy book titles. I first saw him in 2016, I think at ISTE. He was so inspiring, he was like the Gandalf of inspiration and I was interested to see if that is still true today. I wondered if I even still had anything to learn from him. But surprise, surprise, even in 2024, George is still dishing out nuggets of wisdom! I was so inspired that I found his podcast scrolled all the way back to the first episode which was released in 2016. It got me thinking...
In 2011, I became a full-time teacher. I taught three grade levels in this brand-new start-up virtual charter school. We were going to be like the nationally known K12, but oh so very different. In my first year with the school, I taught preK-1st grade. How you ask? I am really not sure. Like every first-year teacher, I was flying by the seat of my pants. Unlike every first-year teacher, I was not certified to teach PreK-1st grades. I got my certification in 3-8th grades because I was sort of a dumb dumb and thought that would be the easiest path to teach. I was a high school dropout, so I knew if I couldn't even finish that work there was no way I would be able to teach it. But the founder of the school told me that if I wanted a job, I would teach those grade levels and that being in a charter didn't require a cert at all so the fact I had one in the first place was a plus. I did so much learning that first year. I was mid-word-wall when I realized I was saying C-a-r like a Bostonian because I was using the short A sound. I told the kids that wasn't right. I would go home, figure out why it wasn't right, and come back tomorrow and tell them where we went wrong. That whole first year, I had to teach myself the content sometime the night before I would go and present it to the class. You know, just casual superhero stuff. I just knew that I had to dedicate myself to the process.
The next year was different. I wasn't in the same type of setup, that's a-whole-nother long story. I was running a small-ish co-op out of my home with 25 students spanning nearly every single grade level. You see the digital curriculum was to do the heavy lifting and I was there to fill the gaps. Except there were sooooo many gaps. And the progression of the digital curriculum was wonky. The skill might be for a 4th grader to plot a coordinate on a graph, but the math to get the coordinate was 5th or 6th-grade math. Teaching bass-ackwards was hard, but I was making it work. I truly was reaching these kids. I brought my concerns to the school and over the summer I helped build the out-of-the-box curriculum into an actual flowable product. Often times I was stealing lessons from a grade above or below to make it fit our state's standards. The problem was still that the digital curriculum was still sort of just a textbook. We were giving these animated textbooks to children and telling them to just move through it.
If you read my past work you know that I am an asker of forgiveness, not a shouter of where I am going to deviate from a plan in place. I have sort of always hacked my way through life, so when I saw that it wasn't (all the way) working I decided to create some projects and writing assignments to supplement the curriculum.
Now it's the 2013-2014 school year and this was the year I found Twitter. I started to get lit, and I had a burning desire to teach and teach other how to teach. I could see what I was doing was working. The kids were having fun. They were self-paced in the digital textbook but were learning through my wild antics as well. In this model if kids "like you" they can choose to stay with you year after year because we "teach" every grade level. Not only did I keep my students (up to 37 students now) from the previous year, but I was growing in popularity in my small-ish town. There was a waitlist to get on my roster so I asked my husband to join in on the fun. He tested and was certified to teach. Now we had 55 students coming to my home on a rotating schedule depending on grade level. I was on Twitter daily and nightly joining in conversations about teaching. Teach Like a Pirate had just come out by Dave Burgess. I was following his mentality around education. We had the OklaEd Twitter chat that at one time was the longest consecutively running weekly Twitter chat centered around education. I was a podcaster with a friend where we talked about EDU. I was a planner in this homegrown professional development movement called Edcamps. I was so ate up with EDU that I drove to Chicago and Stlouis to attend them. I felt like not only was I learning so much, but I started to gain some EduNotariety/followers around my ideas about mixing up the education system. And then, I focused so hard on climbing a ladder at my school that I stopped attending and stopped following the chats. I lost touch with my Twitter pals. I didn't lose my drive and passion for education it just shifted to a more professional world than the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants world. Maybe, I became lame.
Flash forward. I started writing a book 4 years ago, but imposter syndrome decided to camp out in my brain, so finishing it became as elusive as Bigfoot. I have yet to finish it. It's close. I went to my first conference in like 8 years this year and the setup has not changed. In 8 years we are still doing it the same. The keynote was a unique snowflake out there teaching like a pirate, teaching and creating and the room hung on every single word. I was floored that I had been out of the conference game for nearly a decade and the keynote was the exception to the rule...still. So like the book get hot and cold to me. It seems NOTHING has changed in edu. Flashforward to the present...the purpose of this write-up. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, he says we have to tell our stories especially if the things we are doing are working with our students. I know they do still work because I am still implementing them and the students keep coming back for more, but an educators, have we had enough? We are post Covid now and the EDU world was thrown up and down and tossed all around from 2020-2022. Are educators done hearing about all of this or is it still a prime time to teach it? I feel like I still have a message to teach especially for teachers of students with ADHD and Dyslexia, but it's not like I have anything more than my anecdotal success. None of my work is research-backed. I just have 13 years of success in my small world. Am I too late to be jumping on this train? I feel like it's still relevant.
Do I still have a story to tell or are we all just burnt-out marshmallows at this point? Are there still educators out there looking for ways to reach their kids? I will tell you. The higher up you go in education the more it looks like doom and gloom and that everyone is over it all. So, I guess I am asking, Is that right?
